Ant Farm

Group – San Francisco, USA

1968 – 1978

Ant Farm was established within the counter-cultural milieu of
1968 San Francisco by two architects, Chip Lord and Doug Michels,
later joined by Curtis Schreier. Their work dealt with the
intersection of architecture, design and media art, critiquing the
North American culture of mass media and consumerism. Ant Farm
produced works in a number of formats, including agitprop events,
manifestos, videos, performances and installations.

Their early work was a reaction to the heaviness and fixity of
the Brutalist movement in contrast to which they proposed an
inflatable architecture that was cheap, easy to transport and quick
to assemble. This type of architecture fitted well with their
rhetoric of nomadic, communal lifestyles in opposition to what they
saw as the rampant consumerism of 1970s USA. The inflatables
questioned the standard tenets of building: these were structures
with no fixed form and could not be described in the usual
architectural representations of plan and section. They instead
promoted a type of architecture that moved away from a reliance on
expert knowledge. Ant Farm produced a manual for making your own
pneumatic structures, the Inflatocookbook. The inflatables
thus constituted a type of participatory architecture that allowed
the users to take control of their environment. Events were also
organised inside the inflatables, which were set up at festivals,
university campuses or conferences to host lectures, workshops,
seminars, or simply as a place to hang out.

Other projects include the 'House of the Century' whose form was
reminiscent of the inflatables but made from ferrocement, the video
'Media Burn' where they drove an adapted Cadillac into a wall of
televisions in front of an audience hand-picked from the media.
They also produced a number of utopian projects such as Convention
City and Freedom Land. Finally, perhaps their most famous work
'Cadillac Ranch', consists of ten Cadillacs in a row half-buried in
the ground with their tail-fins in the air. It is both a tribute to
the American car culture as well as a critique of it.

Ant Farm were heavily influenced by the likes of Buckminster
Fuller and Archigram and
whilst creating an architecture that was utopian, their projects
were also always ironic and tongue-in-cheek. Their work revealed
the relationships between environmental degradation and mass
industry, questioned the role of mass media and consumerism and
demonstrated the use of advanced technologies with playful projects
like the Dolphin Embassy. They left behind a body of research that
was developed outside the privileged institutional context of
universities and is still relevant today in debates around
sustainable architecture, building technologies as well as public
art and architecture.

Quotes

'We wanted to be an architecture group that was more like a rock
band … We would be doing underground architecture, like underground
newspapers and underground movies, and [a friend] said, "Oh, you
mean like an Ant Farm?"'
- Doug Michels quoted in, C. M. Lewallen, Ant Farm 1968 -
1978, illustrated edition. (University of California Press,
2004), p. 41.